Durham Revue’s amusing lunchtime offering is an enjoyable hors d’oeuvre for anybody with a long but exciting day of comedy-viewing ahead of them. The troupe’s gritty, macabre sketches are tremendously entertaining; one skit about a serial killer mistakenly applying for a job in executive head-hunting elicits paroxysms of laughter, while another concerning the difficulty of performing Japanese ritual-suicide borders on the sublime. Unfortunately, the Revue’s gentler, more whimsical material often fizzles out before the final punchline, and intriguing ideas are not always developed to their funniest potential. This surprise party was not the most memorable I have ever attended, but I still left with a hearty smile on my face and a merry spring in my step.
Underbelly, 4 – 28 Aug (not 15), 12.20pm (1.20pm), £7.50 – £9.50, fpp69.
tw rating: 3/5
[jf]
Sections: by Joseph Fleming - ED2011 Comedy Reviews - tw rating 3/5 | Tags: The Durham Revue, Underbelly
Also from ThreeWeeks...
ED2011 Comedy Review: Golden Showers Of Love (Nick Sun And Dick Moon Deep Star Space Mining And Exploration Corps Ltd)
Nick Sun’s show is failing miserably when a miraculous party of Spanish school children drag his stand up show from dreadful to merely not very good. Sun’s prepared material is...
ED2011 Musicals Review: The Hot Mikado (Durham Fringe Productions)
Breaking the fourth wall is arguably underused in musicals, as casts jazz-hand in unison without so much as a nod at the strangeness of this mad world of song and...
ED2011 Comedy Review: Squirrel Party (Reptile House)
This parody of 90s Children’s television tells the darkly comic story of host Chesley Chippenham’s collapsing marriage overlaid on the wonderfully contrasting background of light hearted animal-friendly fun. While the...
GET ALERTS OF NEW THREEWEEKS CONTENT: Click here to sign up to the free ThreeWeeks email
